Word: manuela
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...court, Mignini often sits back and lets his No. 2 take over questioning, especially when the evidence at issue is technical or scientific. Manuela Comodi, his assistant prosecutor, is a wide-awake pit bull who takes no prisoners. In a nearly two-decade career, she has taken down Catholic cardinals, Albanian mafiosi and bank presidents in major corruption and drug cases. She has been leading the attack on the defense team's scientific experts, and her sharp retorts and exasperated outbursts snap sleepy reporters back to attention. During hot afternoons in the summer, she furiously fanned herself with a black...
...Questions about the painting's attribution have been around for more than a decade, but voicing them has proven difficult. "At a certain point, an artist becomes a mythic national hero, and a painting takes on a life of it's own - it becomes sacred," says Manuela Mena, the Prado's chief curator of 18th-century painting and of Goya's work. "When you challenge that, you might as well be challenging religion - you're seen as a heretic, and you fall into the hands of the inquisition...
...against Napoleon's imperial army, provides the bicentennial occasion for "Goya in Times of War." But in no sense is the show a commemoration of the glories of battle. "For Goya the war was a disaster, a shock for his nation and a shock to his Enlightenment ideas," says Manuela Mena, the exhibition's curator. "You can see his skepticism, his loss of faith in humanity...
...theatrical adaptation, the first Almodóvar has approved in 20 years, introduces a narrative voice absent from the film - Manuela's dead son Esteban, whose periodic, ghostly appearances both nag and reassure the characters, in much the same contradictory way that Manuela's grief haunts and comforts her. When Agrado delivers the great Almodóvarian declaration that "a woman is more authentic the more she looks like what she has dreamed for herself," the cruel subtext is that Manuela's vision of herself as a mother - like her son's ghost - remains forever out of reach...
...stage also poses challenges to the material. Lesley Manville as Manuela, unlike her counterpart in the film, never displays the intimacy of her grief, in part because of the declamatory demands a large space places on an actor. Fortunately, one character who feels at home is the hammy transvestite Agrado, played by Mark Gatiss...